Dutch games

Historically, the Netherlands is not known for game development. The reason why I packed my bags for foreign climes (Germany) in 1991 was that there were no serious game development companies in Holland at the time.

But by now, things have changed.
Amsterdam-based Guerilla Games, although they’ve been around in one form or another for quite some time, are coming out of the blue with two AAA titles: Killzone and Shellshock Nam 67.

(I cannot resist a little rant about Edge here, who did a cover story on Killzone last year, and promptly inserted all the cliches of the British schoolboy in Amsterdam, i.e. marihuana, red lights district, etc. for which they earn my eternal contempt. “Video magazine for grown-ups”, my ass.)

But anyway, a friend of mine from the Netherlands, with whom I used to talk about making games before I ever joined the industry, just sent me an email about a game he’s been working on. It’s called Love Chess.

Based on the Greek and Trojan epos, LoveChess takes you to a place where the gods make love on the chess-board. Play chess with sexy queens and amorous knights on your PC.

The feature list contains such gems as:

Watch the chess pieces make love from every angle you want.

Diverse and unique animations for all movements varying from very tender to very bizarre.

Ambient music that brings a serene sense of peace and tranquility.

And the best double entendre I’ve seen in quite a while:

Proven game play.

Battle Chess + Porn, an unbeatable combination. I’d buy it if it ran on a Mac, and if I liked chess.

It fits in nicely with the Dutch reputation for permissiveness, and it looks like an interesting experiment in presenting sex in real-time 3D. (See also this earlier post on sex in games).

Funny you should mention this, Jurie! I have just landed my first job at Streamline Studios in Hilversum in Holland. They previously made “Gunman Chronicles” – the Half Life TC that made it to retail, and have since been outsourcing to bring in money to work on R&D and their own games – a pretty decent business model when you consider that most of the content for a game ought to be made once the foundation systems are in place. This way, their content creators are not going to waste while waiting for tech to be finished.